1.11 Changelog

Yay. *crosses fingers* and fires up dropbox in anticipation of posting a thread full of crash dumps

Oh been hearing good things from the guys playing around with Brad's builds, maybe I'll fire up a quick game if the patch goes through before I go to bed

I dislike your date format month/day/year i will never understand. Patch however I like.

Hopefully this patch fixes the "Out of Memory" crash.  This is a pretty good game, but that OOM crash prevents me from playing it.

2011/01/06 ftw!

Is this the same AI from 1.1d or has Brad been working on it secretly?

Is the 1.11 going to increase the resources available like in Brad's build? I find the 1.1 no resources world rather depressing...

I'm glad you mentioned that, I'll update the list.  By default the game placed 1 random resource per 200 tiles.  Brad changed it to 1 per 100 tiles and we tuned it back to 1 per 150 tiles.

What's needed here is a better resource allocation system (than just random placement) which is being worked on for 1.2.  But the public 1.11 patch will have resources at halfway between 1.1 and Brad's patch.

he's american.  we also use outdated crap like "feet" and miles.  metric system makes so much more sense...

As a modder, it would be hugely beneficial if we could actually determine the exact amount of spawns on a map, outside the current random placement. A problem right now is that if we introduce new resources on the map, they actually bump the old ones out.

You have the rarity tag right now, but I think a second tag would be useful, such as... <onespawnperland> or whatever. Then we could put a number in which it determined how often this new resource would spawn based on the number in that tag. You say there's one random spawn for every 150 tiles right now, so how about we have a similar functionality for the new tag where we can define one resource VS how many tiles are on the map. For example, <onespawnperland>350</onespawnperland> would mean that after the random resources were placed, it would ALSO place this resource once per every 350 tiles (obviously, 350 is a very very low number here).

Ideally, a resource could then have both the rarity tag and the new tag to provide some randomness.

My situation is that I want to create 5-6 new world resources based on a premise for a mod. However, the system as it is now is just way too random - I can end up with 6 of one type, 3 of another and 0 of the rest - even on a very small map. The new tag would solve that problem.

A third tag comes to mind, which would be something like <alwaysplaceatleast>, which would define how many resources would always be placed on a map, counting resources placed by rarity and the second, new tag. Let's say you get 2 from the rarity tag, then another 1 from the onespawnperland tag. If the alwaysplaceatleast tag was higher than 3, it would then place more until the number was fulfilled. This way, we could guarantee X amount of the new resource on a map, regardless of the size of the map. Then, rarity would take care of truly random placement for a unique experience, and onespawnperland would take care of modifying the spawn so that you always have a certain amount of spawns on large or huge maps, and alwaysplaceatleast would take care of making sure that there is always at the very least X resources on a very small map.

Huh... I really felt like the differnece was bigger than that. In most of the games I played in 1.1 I found nearly nothing as far as resources. In the build Brad put out I usually found 1 or 2 interesting city locations.

Just a small thing: there's a very high chance my math is wrong, but isn't a change of 1/200 to 1/150 actually 33% more, not 50% more?

That said, the changes look nice. As soon as support gets back to me and I can actually register my game and download an update, that is.

It doesn't sound like a guaranteed 1 / 350 spawn for a given resource would be considered a low number at all, if currently all of the resources have to compete for each 1/150.  So it sounds like on average a given resource type spawns (1 / 150) / # resource types, aka 1 per (150 * resource types).  Modified by rarity and then pumped up by Adventure techs, of course...

Yes. An easy way to think of it is that we'll get 4 resources per 600, instead of 3 resources per 600.

If you had a <onespawnperland>200</onespawnperland> you'd get as many of that type as all the other types put together. So 350 is still very low. Most likely reasonable numbers would be above 3000.

Ah!  I see, you meant low # of land per resource, not resources per land.  Gotcha.

It doesn't unfortunately.

It's going to be more complicated to fix because it's not a memory leak but a memory load. The problem with the AI getting better is that it's using more "stuff".

The memory thing is our #1 priority for v1.2.

Great work guys!

So the current "solution" to OOM crash it to play with fewer opponents?

When do we get the 64 bit version?? I want to use all 12GB of my memory!! *drools*

Yeah, we need a resource placement overhaul.  Brad's work helps tremendously by placing more resources in the world but we also need to work on distribution.  You are right that we need some attr to enforce mandatory resource placement.

I'd have to take care of some other details, like getting a new computer, but now that Sandy Bridge is coming, that's ok.

Oh glad to hear there are some plans to overhaul the system for 1.2

How much better than 1.1d will it be, AI-wise ? What can we expect ?

It's the public version of 1.1d with resources tuned down a little and the higher level monsters disabled.  When we got back from vacation this week we started testing Brad's patch, verified it was good for public consumption and decided to push it public (instead of waiting to include it with 1.2).